Video Card Thread (Mostly Gecube x1950xt)

I think that game should run either great...
Or there might only be slight improvement since the X1950XT by GeCube didn't do anything for me either.

But that was either because that thing was a weird case,
or because the CPU was holding me back after all.
I still blame the card, it was such a b*tch to get working.
Good thing I returned it and got the pile of money back.
It was like twice as expensive as the card I mentioned last time.

 

You're right Dinc.

I'm glad you were able to return that card, and I'm glad I never got ready to put in that card.

By the way, a couple posts back I mentioned Band of Brothers, Market Garden. Much to my surprise they have a new awesome trailer that came out just two weeks ago, and the game will launch in August - just two months away. They actually show the colonel who has been advising them, and some of the game developers, and some good game footage.

Here is the new awesome trailer:

New hot trailer for Band of Brothers: Market Garden

The Gecube is gone, now I'm more than ready for the 3850
I came on this forum originally because I was going to put in the Gecube, but to make it work, I was going to also need to upgrade my power supply. (I am hoping the 3850 doesn't use any more power than my current x850xtpe - I was just reading about the 4850 in anandtech and they happened to rate a 3870 at 140 watts, so if the 3850 uses a little less than that I'll be okay.)

This forum helped me do a bunch of stuff to ventilate my case getting ready for the Gecube - following the suggestions of everybody, especially kardson (travis) and sam. I have a kama bay with 1600 rpm 120mm intake fan that takes up 3 cd/dvd drive slots, an added 120mm 800rpm scythe side outlet fan, (however partially blocked blowing through an 80mm hole) and beefed up back 80mm exhaust fan plus 80mm power supply exhaust fan. That's a total of 3 exhaust fans. Plus I bought a kit that allowed me to isolate the cpu inlet fan with a tube to a filtered side case inlet, so that the cpu gets only fresh outside air. In addition to that I mounted a bliztorm dual fan card just under the graphics card. The blitztorm has a turbine that blows out the back, giving me a total of 4 outlet fans, and an extra fan blowing up or down, depending on how you place it - I have it blowing up toward the graphics card. So with 4 outlet fans, and 2 inlet fans, (the 1600 rpm scythe in front somewhat balances the load between input and output) I have a lot of ventilation. I also have to admit I have a pretty noisy case, especially when I crank up the blitztorm to max revs.

But I game with headphones so I don't care. All the rest of the time when I am not gaming, I am using other computers that don't make any noise. When I get around to building a new rig, I'll tap into Sam's great silencing experience, and build something a bit more elegant.

The 3850 will not be as good as the x850xtpe heat-wise, since it doesn't vent out the back. The kama bay is mounted at the top of the front of the case with my DVD burner just under it - so it will be blowing in over the top, and the 3850 card will be blowing toward the front just under it, toward the hard drives. There will be some interesting circular turbulence in the front of my case.

It won't be quite as cool as my setup now, but I am still pretty confident that I can get all that heat out of the case and keep everything running cool. Worst case, I could beef up the side exhaust fan - I am using the mild 800 rpm scythe that originally came with the kama bay. I could swap that out for a 1600 rpm scythe, for about $35, if I needed to.

Anyway, Dinc, I never had to go through all the frustration you guys experienced with the gecube, you, travis, ray, mike. I move along so slowly the magical 3850 solution appeared!

But as I mentioned to Sam, this is just temporary. I'm missing all the really good eye candy. And that's a huge part of the fun of these games, as Sam points out. So when I'm ready for the new build, and over 10,000 3dmarks, I'll be looking at what they've done to the 4870 by then, and maybe they'll even have cards that can run crysis at 2560 x 1600, the resolution Sam likes to use on his Dell. Because that's going to be part of the new build also, a Dell like Sam's running at 2560 x 1600.

- Rich

 

Dinc:It messes around with the firmware of the drives, which not only damages the software part of them (which can be fixed with a reflash) but also the hardware part, which needless to say can't.
As for online games, you have to agree that most people who you play on the net are asses, it's just what happens unfortunately.

Rich: I am doing ok on the Asus 3870, I wasn't able to replace the powercolor card as there is no manufacturer warranty, and I bought it off ebay so no retail warranty either, so I sold it on ebay as a 'faulty product' and made £30 from it - a far cry from the £160 it originally cost me, but at least I got some of my money back.
The highest 3dmark I got with the two cards was 13801, and you want the reason? My CPU! No matter how much graphical muscle you throw at it, it's hard to get above 14000 with a 3Ghz (or close to) Core 2 Duo - so now you know why your score is low with a P4!
The HD3870 was just a bit of a pain in the neck in its conception, and has finally matured, it's a habit of ATI's to make products that aren't at all ready for market and sell them anyway. Fortunately the two cards I had before the 3870, an X1900XT and X800Pro AGP had both been out a few months before I bought them, and they were fine. nvidia have had their fair share of this too, for example the woefully inefficient first revision cooler on the 8800GT.
My 3007WFP was £777.17 on ebay, at the time they were worth £1500, now they're worth about £700 because the 3007WFP-HC, and now the vastly superior 3008WFP have come along. These prices in dollars, minus the VAT work out to be $1311, $2530 and $1180 respectively, but we still pay a bit more in the UK than the US, even before the tax.

I liked band of brothers a lot (watched it in HD... ) so I'm excited at the news of a game about it, I will look for an HD quality trailer of it if I can find one (30" monitors make standard def look a little shoddy... hehe)

What specific PSU are you using, Rich? Because most low rated but high quality units would fare OK with a 4850, a 380W Earthwatts would manage, but if it's a cheap unit, you can't afford to have a single watt more than what you use now, even the slightest increase in power consumption can send one of those into a fiery oblivion.
Why would a 1600rpm Scythe cost you $35? I'm pretty sure they're only $20 from Newegg...

You will certainly be amazed at what you see with a 2560x1600 monitor. The good news is that even an HD4850 solo can run GRiD at 2560x1600 with maximum eye candy nice and smooth - my 3870 doesn't do that badly, and it's half as fast as the 4850!
I play Crysis at 2560x1600 on my 3870 believe it or not, by setting shadows to low and Shaders to medium - the rest of it goes on high. The game doesn't look the same, but it still looks nice. With a 4850, you could get even closer to the maximum, as long as you don't use AA or shadows and have a decent CPU, Crysis isn't as absurd as a lot of people make out. For most games, not using AA and shadows makes them look *@£!!"£! but in Crysis, the shadows are blocky and generally poor quality unless you use CFG mods to put them at very high artificially (normally you can only do that in Vista with DX10, with even more of an impact on performance) and AA is generally pretty poor as well as it does not Anti-alias the entire image, only certain parts of it.
In general, a single 4870 can run pretty much everything at 2560x1600 without having to turn much down. The only exception I can think you might struggle with is Age of Conan, because it isn't very well optimised for ATI cards. It will still run alright, but you might have to cut back on the draw distance a wee bit...

 

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/5/677037#4151874

could we USE THE STICKIE for the gfx talk?

 

Agreed, this thread's pretty redundant now.

Rich: Watched the trailer for Hell's Highway, looks pretty good, though the graphics aren't as good as I've seen in other titles, being based on Ubisoft's adaptation of the Unreal Engine 3 though, that was to be expected.
P.S. It's brothers in arms, not band of brothers...

 

Hvd - Forget AGP! Loose the P4, you'd get 4000+ 3dmark with a E2160 and a 8600GT! (I know because that's what I built my dad and he's rocking about 5k!) And you could probably pick up those bits for about the same as that card anyway!!

Re: Grid / Dirt, Grid is a quality game, and has really taken the level of eye candy from Dirt and made it playable on many more gaming pcs out there! However, in Dirt's defence there is a lot less 'game' going on behind the scenes in Grid, simply to do with the level of mip-mapping. In Grid you race along nice flat streets, that maybe go up or down on a set gradient then level out nicely. Dirt has cambers, bumps, dips, jumps and a variety of surfaces in abundance which is where all the extra cpu crippling calculations come from.
Dirt was the game that forced my upgrade from the old P4 and ultimately landed me on this thread. My machine is now a C2D at 3.01Ghz, 13k 3dmark06 and although it plays 90% of the game beautifully in 'ultra max everything' @ 1280x1024, put on a rallycross stage with 8 competitors using super-quick xaras and saabs and it grinds to a halt at every corner, frames dropping to low teens and jumping like crazy.
Perhaps when I have a E8400 @ 4ghz I will be able to run it?....
(And ps hvd, you really need to loose the P4 and get yourself multi-cored!)

 

Wow, from the Band Of Brothers series?
I love that... now see what kind of game they make of it...

*Looks*

Oh, it's brothers in arms... -_-'
But is it still spun-off from the series then?
I know it's about the same story, but yeah.

Well, I already saw Brothers In Arms, this same trailer actually,
and I loved the authenticity.
I will sure check this one out anyways.
And I just hope it will be very realistic too.
I'll be so frustrated if I see a crosshair in the HUD...

 

Maccer: At 1280x1204 max, a single 8800GT isn't enough for Dirt, my CPU can keep up, but not my graphics card.

 

Really? You have one now? My 8800GT is fine for Dirt in ultra, 4xaa at 1280x1024, admittedly it has a moderate factory overclock but nothing substantial. The graphics card is perfectly capable (and indeed a stock GT would be), what it needs is more cpu juice in the most intense parts of the game.
Your cpu doesn't have to be at 100% utilisation to be maxing out, and your 2mb cache will be holding you back. My E6320 has 4mb, and it will play Dirt fine all about 40-60fps apart from the 'rallycross superstars' races which are the most Cpu intensive - lots of quick cars, different surfaces, and large parts of the track where you can see the cars behind you on another part of the track. Guaranteed when I get a E8400 with 6mb cache and a faster clock speed it will have the extra horses to deal with those very intense parts.

 

No, I have an HD3870, but they're not that different. Maxing DiRT at 1280x1024 earnt me frame rates of only twenties, which for a racing game sucks. Turning AA off bumped it up to 40 odd, so I know it's not my CPU.

 

Yeah, but have you played the circuits I'm on about? Your 3870 is going to die with AA turned on. The GT can hack the AA, so we get a similar framerate. Just try your system - whatever settings you normally run - on the rallycross stages, use a xsara and watch your machine struggle on practially every corner!!
Thinking about it, my framerates don't even change - it just stutters - definitely cpu!

 

DiRT ran so badly on my system I uninstalled it, can't really be bothered to put it back. As for 'the 8800GT can hack the AA' - it's a bit more complex than that, but I'll leave that out unless you want me to explain what really happens...

 

No, that's fine. I don't really want to get into a 'Nvidia are cheating b@stards and Ati are much better because...' discussion, I was just saying that even with a 4mb l2 3ghz c2d Dirt still wants a bit more cpu juice in some parts of the game. (Then you told me that my card wasn't good enough to run it and we ended up here!!)
Edit: And if it ran so badly on your system, you didn't think about the cpu at all? No, I guess you just assume in that case that the 3870 was not enough and therefore a 8800gt cannot be enough!

 

I do - because if the CPU is the limiting factor, the frame rate won't increase if you turn the graphics down. It does, so the CPU is not entirely to blame.

 

Ok, so a cpu has no involvement with the level of graphic detail?

 

Very little. Extra effects affect (pardon the pun) the CPU, but Anti-Aliasing is pretty much exclusive to the GPU, as typically is the resolution.

 

Ok, so if you turn the graphics down, and turn off things like 'wind effects' and 'motion blur' then the framerate will increase substantially along with playability because you have taken load off the cpu. You cannot max Dirt because your cpu cannot handle these cpu bound graphical effects, they are very cpu intensive - hence my original comments about needing a better cpu, (not gfx card) a better cpu to be able to max Dirt. Nothing to do with gfx.

 

Perhaps it's the case with DiRT then, but it's very rare for graphical detail to have a profound effect on the performance due to your CPU - Crysis for example doesn't really care about the CPU for all the eye candy you turn on, no matter how low or high it goes, and how fast or slow your graphics card is, the highest frame rate you're likely to get on average is around 35.

 

Hmmm, well I suspect the two will become more closely related until the introduction of integrated physics processors in the next gen GPUs. Re: the crysis comment, I've not seen any comparisons between say a E21x0, a E4x00, E6x00, E8x00, and Q9xx0 and say some Athlon X2s. I'm sure that you would find some stark differences between the low and high ends using the same card & settings tho.

 

I got the same frame rate with a 3.2Ghz E4300 as a 3.6Ghz Q6600...